by Deck Davis
Chapter One
You never forget seeing your first demon, isn’t that what they say? That’s what Molly told me the first time I saw mine, and the image of that ugly, brimstone-smelling creature was burned into my mind for eternity.
The stupidest thing was, all I could think about was how insane my life had become to lead me there. All the things that had to go wrong to get me to a point where I was facing a creature of the underworld with the intention of banishing it from Earth, sending its ugly little ass back to the pit of fire and fry.
How did I, a champion boxer, end up living like that?
I used to see my name in lights, but that was in another lifetime. I’ve screwed up too much for it to be another other than a memory, and even though I miss those days, I hate thinking about them. Thinking about the good times always leads to the bad, and the bad thoughts always lead one direction; the night everything fell.
The lights were big back then, and they seemed even larger when it was my name they lit up. Joshua Tempest. Giant neon lights, so bright I was half-blinded by the time I got into the ring. I’d climb in-between the ropes as the crowd cheered my name. I’d jump in the air three times, the back of my boots hitting the backs of my thighs. That was just my thing, I did it every time. Call it superstition, if you want. The sweat from my warm-up would already be cold but my body would flush with pride from the songs the spectators sang about me. Joshua Tempest, champion of Britain. What was next? A shot at a European belt? Maybe a world title? Anything was possible then, back before years of darkness.
After the fight, there were always more lights, these ones flashing in a sequence that gave me white spots in my eyes. Camera lenses pointed at me, at the bumps on my forehead and the sweat on my chest. Each flash froze me in time, capturing the blood on my nose and the bruises on my face, already swelling up. Glora would call me the Elephant Man for days afterwards. She wasn’t the most sensitive woman even back then, when she still cared about me and before I lost myself and drove her away.
Still in the ring, the interviewer would put a hand on my shoulder, trying to be my buddy, picking through the carcass of my dazed answers for scraps of news. Who will I fight next? Why do I fight? Who do I fight for, at the end of it all? The answer to that was always the same; I fight for them. Glora and Ruby. The answer is the same years later, only they don’t want me to fight for them anymore. They need me to, but they don’t want it. We’re stuck in a parasitic relationship where they have to feed from me, and I from them, but I’m looking for love and any sign they still care, but the things I did to them mean I can’t expect much of that. All they want is the money.
The lights on the night of my last chance weren’t neon and they didn’t cast out my name for everyone to see. They were pale, not much brighter than table lamps, and the crowd didn’t cheer for me. They barely paid attention to my ring-walk, instead puffing on cigarettes and blowing the fumes in front of me. Smoking indoors was illegal, but it wasn’t the sort of place where legal meant much. If I took the time to look, I’d probably have seen a police sergeant here, a lieutenant there, their badges left at home, the women draped around them not their wives.
My fight wasn’t important to the crowd. I wasn’t important to them. My ring walk was something to look at in-between shots of whiskey. When I climbed into the ring it was just movement in their peripheral vision, something going on but not worth watching. The crowd weren’t here for me. They were here to escape from their wives, to get drunk, to sit and seethe in a mist of cigarette smoke, to waste away the hours until after midnight, where maybe they’d go to a club and bury themselves even deeper in a haze of liquor, maybe enough so that they danced, getting lost in music, nibbling on soft earlobes after asking their girlfriends or boyfriends or casual fuck-buddies or a stranger if they wanted to get out of here, to go home and do what they really wanted, what the night had been all about for them. Then the next morning they’d have a dozen missed calls, and they’d have to awkwardly say bye to the person in bed next to them. They’d have hangover breath; their clothes would stink. Maybe they’d get the bus home, or maybe they’d take a risk and drive. Perhaps even the police lieutenants would do that. The fight was just a prelude to it all, for them. It was just a passage of time.
Not for me. When I was an up-and-comer, fight nights were my world. Three month-long training camps, working harder than it should have been possible, pushing my body to breaking point just to tease out that extra one percent of skill that I’d need to beat the increasingly-tougher guys who marked my way up the ladder. When I won my first 5 fights, people started talking about me. When I knocked the seventh guy out, himself an undefeated prospect from Moscow, the newspapers wrote their first articles about me. First the Manchester gazette, where they wrote about me with pride as one of Manchester’s own - Josh Tempest, middleweight rising through the ranks and destined for stardom. When I won a wafer-thin points victory over a Cuban guy whose hands flew like rockets, the national papers picked me up.
Time for a world title fight? Can he make the step up? Can anyone stop him? The kind of questions that make a man feel big, make him think the hell he puts his body through is worth it.
Call me vain, but it made me feel important. Seeing my name in lights, having a team swarming around me, checking my nutrition, asking how I felt, telling me I was the best, negotiating radio advertisements and sneaker endorsements, getting companies to pay crazy money just to have their name on my shorts, plastered all over my ass. The game has a habit of building you up and making you the king. Like everything, things crash. Kings get their heads chopped off. For some guys it’s a gentle decline; they hit a rung on the ladder they just can’t climb over. Maybe they hit the peak of their talent. Maybe they’re unlucky, and they get caught with a flush shot that whacks the confidence out of them, and even though they pick themselves up, they never truly recover.
For me, it was over in a flash. I didn’t lose. I didn’t hit my peak. There was no slow descent. It was over in a second; less than a second, even. The time it took me to throw a left hook at the wrong time, at the wrong guy, on the wrong part of his head.
Darkness falls fast when your sun stops shining, and I’d lost the tan on my face years ago.
The referee in the ring beckoned me on. I was walking too slow, I realized. I was savoring it; my last chance, maybe the last time I’d ever ring-walk, even if it was in a dump like this. You know what they say; one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and even in a smoke-filled shithole there were guys in the audience looking for something glinting.
I picked up my pace, but I scanned the crowd while I walked. I was looking for him. The guy scouting the trash for rare treasure. Maybe he’d be wearing a suit. An expensive one, not like the one in my apartment, the one crumpled in the back of the wardrobe, the one I only wore for weddings and funerals, even if it had been a while since I was asked to go to either.
Funerals. The word brought back the last one I’d been to. The tear-filled faces. The hateful stares and the feeling in my head that I shouldn’t be there, that I was the last person in the world who should have been there.
A left hook at the wrong time, at the wrong guy, on the wrong part of his head.
There was no sign of the treasure seeker in the crowd. The cigarette haze made it hard to see, but I was sure I’d recognize him. Maybe I’d been duped, and this fight wasn’t a big deal, and there would be nobody from M&G Promotions there tonight.
From the second I’d taken the call for the fight, something went off inside me. A warning siren, mixing with the nerves.
“Dukeman had to pull out,” the guy had said. I could hear stuff in the background; mobile phones going off, a tv announcer talking about fight results from the night befor
e. “His trainer found him at the bottom of his stairs. Stupid bugger had fallen down them, couldn’t move for hours. He’d pissed himself by the time they got to him.”
I remember thinking it was strange, that a fighting guy, an up-and-comer at the peak of fitness, would fall down a flight of stairs. It didn’t seem like something that happened to a guy like that.
“Sorry to hear that,” I’d said, still piecing together why the news would prompt a call to me. My phone hardly rang anymore.
“He was fighting at the Ocadian next Saturday.”
“Who against?”
“Franz Huck. You know him? Used to be a European middleweight champion, until he moved up to super middleweight and got his nose broken a dozen times. Dukeman was going to fight him at the Ocadian.”
“The Ocadian is a dump. You sure that’s the right place?”
“Do I sound like I’m talking out of my arse?”
“What’s this got to do with me?”
“We can’t cancel the bill so close. We need someone to fight Franz.”
The excitement stirred in me then. When I was 15-0, I would have beaten Huck while cruising in third gear. Now, out of condition, a journeyman, just a sack of flesh for prospects to beat on, it had been a long time since I’d been asked to fight against a guy like that.
It was a chance. The biggest I’d had in years. There was no way I’d get back into proper shape in time, but would my instincts take me through it?
“How’s Franz looking?” I asked.
“Lean as hell. Knocked his sparring partner cold on Tuesday.”
“How’d you come to me?” I asked.
“Cycling through the lists. You know how it goes.”
I did know how it went. Shit happened, people got injured, and it was better to bring in someone unprepared or ring-rusty than cancel on fans who’d bought tickets. That didn’t answer the question, though. Why me? I was so far behind that kind of level, it was like I was staring up at a sky scraper and watching Franz Huck waving at me from the top floor.
Things just didn’t add up. A call out of the blue from a promoter I’d never spoken to before. Eli Groves, he said his name was. I’d never met him, and I was surprised he even had me on the lists he’d cycled through. There must have been a dozen guys higher up the middleweight ladder. It was the biggest chance that had come my way in years, but my natural cynicism was jabbing me in the eye.
I knew what happened, sometimes. The seedy deals promoters made in their offices. The way they talked about their fighters like they were toys, maneuvering them from this fight to that, straining their brains to work out how they could wring the most money from the guy who was sweating all day in the gym. There were good promoters, sure. Guys with work ethic and morals. But there were also bad ones.
“You better not expect me to take a fall,” I said.
Eli laughed. “I’m not the mafia, Joshua. If you don’t want the fight...”
“No,” I said, knowing I sounded too eager. “I’ll take it.”
So, the Ocadian might have been a dump. It might have been the kind of place where they spread sawdust on the floor to soak up the inevitable blood, vomit, and piss, but Franz Huck was Franz Huck, and it was rumored that a couple of the big promoters had sent their magpies out to try and spot gold. A win in front of one of those could get me back. It could lift me up from my journeyman status, stop me being just a carcass for the up-and-comers to pummel.
Now, it was down to my instincts. My body was a dump. Sure, put me next to your average guy and I’d look good; I was still fighting for a living, after all, but I’d been drinking more, eating crap, easing off on the 5am runs. It’s a funny thing, when motivation leaves you. You feel sapped. You’re like the towel on the gym floor, drenched with so much sweat you can’t absorb any more, and then you’re discarded, with no use left in you.
Maybe I could get it back. When I thought about Groves’ offer, something sparked in me. A fuse burning down a line, leading to a detonation. It was an explosion of dreams in my head; money. Another chance at climbing the ladder. Newspapers, photographers, my name on billboards again.
But all of that was just a dream, while I held the receiver to my ear. It’d take weeks of sweat to get back in prime condition, and Groves’ offer gave me less than a week. And there was one thing I’d neglected to tell Eli Groves. I knew as soon as I uttered the words, the offer would be yanked away.
I looked at my hand. The fracture was three weeks ago. The way it happened was beyond stupid; I was in Turner’s Gym, and they asked me to spar with this kid. He was lean as hell, he’d knocked out his first five pro opponents, and he thought he was the gym star. I took time out of my session to get in the ring with him when his regular sparring partner got glandular fever. Sure, I thought, I’ll get the headgear on, give him a few rounds, do the kid a favor. But it was the way he looked at me when I climbed into the ring. The roll of his eyes, the lazy sip he took on his water bottle when he glanced at me once and then looked away. I was an old chump to him. Thirty-six might not be old in context, but in the ring, I might as well have been a mummy behind the glass of a museum exhibition.
It was vanity again. That was what made me take risks when I was sparring the kid. That was why I made stupid mistakes, it was what made me end up with my ass on the floor, the kid scoffing, his coach shaking his head.
I left the gym, headed straight into the changing rooms and slugged a locker. The metal bent, and I knew I’d have to pay for it, but in a way, I already had. I got a fracture that stopped me using my left hand for three weeks. For a southpaw, losing your left hand is the worst.
It was bad enough then, when all it did was stop me training on my own. Now? A chance had unexpectedly landed into my lap, and the only thing I thought about as I stepped into the ring was about whether the fracture had healed enough. It felt okay, but that meant nothing. One hit, and the bones could shatter if they weren’t healed properly. I had no choice; I had to take the chance.
A smart phone flashed somewhere in the crowd. Was it aimed at me? Did I even want it to be? The lights and the flashes and the posters with my name on them were memories of the earlier days, and I wanted them back so much, but at the same time it would never be like it was before.
But no. The flash of light wasn’t for me, because I saw them then; a group of four lads near the back of the room, the gangliest one holding the smart phone as far in front of them as he could to try and get a selfie of the group posing with a security guard who looked like Lennox Lewis.
Music played. It was ACDC’s Back in Black; miles apart from my own selection of Walk the Line by Johnny Cash. A strobe flickered and then stopped, almost as if the guy in charge of the lights couldn’t be bothered putting on a show. A bottle rolled off a table and then smashed, drawing the attention of Lennox Lewis the guard. Then he appeared, at the head of the path I’d just walked, a man who drew more stares than me.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the ring announcer, referee, and probably Ocadian cleaner all rolled into one, “Coming to the ring, boasting a record of…”
I turned out all the schtick about wins and losses and weights and measurements, turning my attention back only when a name was called.
“…Franz ‘The Captain’ Huck!”
I gave one last look at the crowd, my gaze searching over tables and chairs and rows and taking in every last face, trying to spot the representatives from the promotion company, the guys whose eyes I’d have to catch, but I didn’t see them.
That was the last look I allowed myself, because I had to tune the crowd out from there on. I’d paid them too much attention already. It was a truth as old as any that you fought for yourself, not the crowd, and you couldn’t let them into your head. I’d done that too much already.
The next few minutes were a blink. Announcements, the sound of chairs scraping, the crowd picking up a little, people cheering, bottles tinkling, cigarette smoke rising in a haze.
Then I was face
to face with Franz Huck. He was bigger than me. Leaner too, well-cut, and more conditioned. He didn’t have the softness in his body that I did, that sign of a guy who’d let himself get out of condition. Huck, with his shaved head and his ripped muscles, he looked ready.
And there was something in his eyes.
I’d never broken from a stare before. Never in thirty-four fights. But as we waited to touch gloves and I stared at this man, something stared back that shook me deep. Something foul, so real I could feel it, a well of darkness set in deep eye sockets.
Chapter Two
That stare. Those eyes. They followed me out of the Ocadian, their darkness swimming in my mind long after I took a cab – which the promoters should have paid for but didn’t – away from the venue and to the accident emergency department of the Elmwick hospital in the city centre.
I should have been thinking about the loss. I should have been worried about the throb in my hand, the bones I’d fractured again after I threw a wicked hook in the second round that rocked Franz Huck and turned his legs to jelly. The ropes had caught him, and in my older days, when I was hungry, when I was fresh, before that night and everything that followed, I would have pounced on him. I would have caught him flush in a daze of punches, fast and with no hint of mercy. He’d have hit the floor hard and fast, his eyes watery and unfocussed. Even then, when his head was in the clouds, I’d have waited, like a shark smelling blood in the water, my cold gaze piercing the depths to find my kill.
Instead, the pain had been so intense that I couldn’t follow with another punch. Agony welled inside me, and I did what I’d never, ever done before. I turned my back on Huck. I couldn’t think. The pain was so bad it made my eyes water, and I knew I’d done worse than fracture my bones this time. Even before I took off my glove I knew it was bad, that my bones would look more mangled than a car in a crusher. And Huck had recovered, his jelly legs had solidified again, and I turned just in time to see a black glove rushing at my face.
